the times | Friday July 31 2020 1GT 7
Mildred Pierce is Available from
Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google
Play. Join Kevin Maher for a live chat
about the film on Monday, August 3
from noon to 1.30pm. To submit your
thoughts and questions in advance,
post them in the comments below
the article at thetimes.co.uk/artsWill Hodgkinson
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Rachel Campbell-Johnston
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Ben Dowell
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Unhinged
15, 93min
{{{{(The wheels come off for Russell Crowe as ‘The Man’ — and that’s just in the pre-title sequence
A larger-than-life
Russell Crowe is
grimly compelling
in a film made
to fill cinemas,
says Kevin Maher
the big film
SPLASH NEWSThe toxic villain we truly deserve
F
inally, four full weeks
after UK cinemas
began their tentative
reopening process comes
a reason to return to the
multiplex. Yes, there
have been noble and
noteworthy dramas
released in the interim (last week
The Traitor and Saint Frances were
extraordinarily strong), but this
barnstorming road-rage thriller is
the first post-lockdown title that
dares to give us pre-pandemic
cinematic pleasures.
It features high-tension car chases,
motorway pile-ups, horrific axe
murders, memorable one-liners,
meaty subtext about disenfranchised
white males and an enormous, ursine
Russell Crowe giving his most
compelling screen turn since he
played the whistleblower Jeffrey
Wigand in The Insider.
He was huge in that too, having
piled on more than 50lb to capture
Wigand’s portly demeanour. In this
he’s even bigger and has deployed to
devastating effect some of the excess
weight (reportedly 77lb) required to
play the Fox News boss Roger Ailes
in the US TV series The Loudest Voice.
He opens the film in sinister
close-up, as the rain drums against his
character’s trademark pick-up truck
(the sternum-rattling rumble of the
car’s engine will subsequently become
as significant as the shark fin in Jaws).
His mouth hangs slightly open, a
lovely Neanderthal touch that Croweutilises throughout. He stares off
camera to a large suburban home that,
helped by crystal-clear film-making,
we realise belongs to his wife, his
children, and his wife’s new partner.
Within seconds, and mostly shot from
below — overemphasising his
intimidating bulk — Crowe’s character
has butchered everyone in the house
and set the place on fire. And that’s
just the pre-title sequence.
Crowe’s character has no name.
He is simply called “the Man” in the
credits. It’s a trick that the movie has
borrowed from that other great male-
rage parable Falling Down, where the
lead protagonist played by Michael
Douglas was known throughout only
by his number plate, “D-Fens”.
It implies that the role has a
metaphorical edge, speaking for anentire silent generation of the
frustrated, the underappreciated and
the overlooked. Yet whereas D-Fens
had a whiff of sympathy about him
(and Douglas certainly played it that
way, asking plaintively by the end,
“I’m the bad guy?”), Crowe’s Man is
full-bore homicidal psychosis. He is
the toxic Time’s Up villain we truly
deserve, the alt-right uncle of Joaquin
Phoenix’s incel hero Arthur Fleck in
Joker. And, in every frame, utterly
fascinating to watch.
The central narrative begins the
morning after the massacre, and
follows the misfortunes of soon-to-be-
divorced Rachel (an effective Caren
Pistorius), a failed hairdresser and
mother of one who takes the impulsive
yet ultimately disastrous decision to
deliver, in traffic, a prolonged hornhonk to the Man, who is frozen at
the lights in the pick-up truck in
front of her.
The Man subsequently rolls up
alongside Rachel and his quiet yet
simmering disquisition on the benefits
of a “courtesy tap” (a gentle beep),
while his light blue shirt is speckled
red with the blood spatters from his
murdered children, is one of the most
chilling moments in the movie.
Crowe speaks with a sonorous
southern-boy growl, note-perfect,
like Bill Clinton after a couple of
hundred Rothmans. When Rachel
defends the honking by claiming that
she’s had, so far, a very bad day, the
Man just sneers. “I don’t think you
know what a bad day is,” he says.
“But you’re going to find out. You’re
going to f***ing learn.” There are
chilling echoes of Robert De Niro’s
Max Cady in Martin Scorsese’s
Cape Fear (“You’re going to learn
about loss”).
If you’ve seen the Ben Affleck
thriller Changing Lanes or Steven
Spielberg’s Duel, you’ll know what
happens next. A game of cat-and-
mouse ensues, one that becomes
increasingly lethal, as the Man steals
Rachel’s phone and begins to murder
his way through her contacts list.
His goal, he announces early on,
is “suicide by police”, which makes
his actions even more reckless
and nihilistic, and gives the New
Orleans-set film a certain amount
of unexpected topicality.
Elsewhere, the director Derrick
Borte and the screenwriter Carl
Ellsworth do their best to add
Meaning with a capital M to what is
essentially a fabulously silly B-picture
by repeatedly cutting to media reports
about societal rage, inequality and
how celebrity culture fuels feelings
of inadequacy.
They are also smart enough to let
this rapid-fire burst of big-screen
mayhem play without longueurs
(it’s just over 90 buttock-clenching
minutes), and to hand over everything
— the primal impact, the credibility
and the emotional power — to
Russell Crowe.
Available in cinemasTHE
CRITICS
other kind of life. Just cooking and
washing and having children.”
That she becomes a restaurant
magnate with avaricious businessmen
falling at her feet is a hugely satisfying
character arc — the kind that’s still
conspicuously absent from the Time’s
Up era movie milieu.
The real draw, however, is Crawford,
never better than here, swinging from
brittle to bamboozled to brutally
unforgiving. Come for the feminist
subtext, stay for the performance.Often hidden by the shadow of
Casablanca, this “second best” film,
from 1945, by the director Michael
Curtiz becomes more relevant through
the ages. It’s a feminist clarion call that
focuses on Joan Crawford’s self-made
careerist, who begins her movie
flashback with, “I never knew anyFilm Club
Mildred Pierce
Joan Crawford and Ann Blyth
Kevin Maher’s weekly
film club continues with
a Joan Crawford classic